


Between Juniper and Junket

by jar



Category: RocknRolla (2008)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-19
Updated: 2010-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-12 00:17:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jar/pseuds/jar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for my <a href="http://swear-jar.livejournal.com/871581.html#cutid1">kink_bingo card</a>, for the prompt "penance/punishment".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Juniper and Junket

"You look good, Johnny," Archy looks him over head to toe.

Johnny sits down, doesn't resist the urge to lean back in the chair and plant his boot heels on his dear dead Daddy's desk. Archy's desk. Johnny's now.

Archy smiles.

He was always hard to ruffle.

"And you're all clean now."

"Not so much with the clean, please, Archy," Johnny pulls a cigarette from the packet nestled in his shirt pocket, lights it. Points with cigarette held between index and middle finger when Archy looks as if he's about to speak again. "I can assure you I am still a very dirty boy."

Archy's nostrils flare; Johnny thinks of dragons. He waves Archy over and hands him a cigarette. Archy plants his hip against the side of the desk and watches Johnny like he's waiting for permission to speak. It tickles Johnny that Archy is obviously just a little bit annoyed at him, but is keeping mum out of some misguided form of respect.

"I stole my first one of these from Guess Who?"

He holds his cigarette so it stands up from his fist like a raised middle finger.

"Consider the debt paid back," Archy says. He snorts smoke from his nostrils and Johnny thinks he might start calling Archy _dragon_. It suits him.

"Who's really in debt here?" Johnny says. "My first addiction, and nearly the last." Johnny looks up from the precarious tower of ash that has burned down between them on his upright cigarette. Archy's looking down at him. It reminds him of being a boy and always, always looking up into the face of this man who was so cruel and so kind, and wanting something from him he couldn't have -- seven years old and belt bruised across the buttocks, he'd wanted Archy to be his real Daddy.

He still wants something like that from him, only now he's a grown up with several souls and a similar amount of overdoses to his name, it's not quite so dewy-eyed and innocent.

* * *

Johnny Quid is still a musician of sorts -- he's the Pied Piper, playing the music all the rats follow. The problem is that rats, with their tiny brains, are really quite stupid.

The next person who states that he has changed, really changed, or _seems_ different is going to end up with the nearest sharp to Johnny's hand embedded in the side of their neck; Archy's warnings about restraining some of his urges in front of the help lest they think he's _crazy_ be fucked.

He is not having a good day, and Archy is going to help him salvage what's left of it.

"People don't _change_ ," he's telling Archy. "We're all still basically _apes_ , though we walk without dragging our knuckles -- if we're lucky -- and send our children away to boarding schools to learn sums and homosexuality."

Archy hums, watches Johnny over the desk between them, but doesn't interrupt.

"I am, right now, your boss and in fact, _the_ boss. But I am still, in the depths of my black, black heart the fucked-up junkie that Daddy shot, and deeper still, the kid that Daddy belted until he puked across the expensive duvet.

"And as I have evolved into this superior life form you see before you now," half-sarcastic, he has evolved, that's all he's sure of, "I have brought some of those memories from my previous lives with me: not so far back, somewhere in the time of the fucked-up junkie, thieving was my way -- hence: your watch, Archy, in my pocket."

He holds out Archy's vintage Rolex.

The watch, Johnny knows, is older than he is, and has in all probability seen more than he ever has from its usual place on Archy's wrist.

"You little shit," Archy says, sitting up and snatching it from where it dangles between them over the desk. There's a memory in the words: Johnny still at school, right before he'd been given the boot, Archy, half-amused and half-genuinely angry, kicking Johnny's feet out from under him when he found two of his gold rings on Johnny's bedside cabinet.

Johnny's is up out of his chair and sliding across the desk to bracket Archy with his legs over the other side, toes shoved under Archy's thighs.

"Further back, it gets murkier and more confused: the legacy of all that violence, pants around my ankles and buttocks bared, has gotten rather mixed up, leaving me not retching in fear at the sight of a belt run over steady fingers -- such as yours, Uncle -- but instead with a hard-on you could use to kneecap the next petty criminal stupid enough to call me junkie while you're in the room.

"Speaking of which, you needn't get so mad on my account, Arch. I _yam what I yam_." He screws up one eye and talks out the side of his mouth, Popeye with a junkie's eyes.

"Johnny, I have to hit 'em when they give you lip, or else they won't learn."

"Archy," Johnny shakes his head slow to emphasis his disappointment. "I fear you might have missed my point."

Archy leans back, looking at the ceiling instead of Johnny, and Johnny leans forward, elbows on his knees, smelling Archy's cologne, cigarettes, sweat.

"I'm not smacking you round, Johnny," Archy says, looking down from the ceiling and fixing his gaze on Johnny, cold and calm.

Johnny, though, sees through Archy's dead-man's stare and colder than ice tone.

"It don't work like that." Archy's fingers go tight around Johnny's ankle. Johnny is a little hard, and getting harder.

Archy's fingers are digging bruises into his skin just under the cuff of his trousers and his jaw is clenched tight.

He speaks as if there is no irony in staring Johnny down about this, in forcing Johnny to stop here, all the while implying he couldn't possibly make Johnny do anything, as Johnny is his boss.

Archy is one of the few people that Johnny has never been able to out-stare. When Johnny closes his eyes, his mind supplies him with pictures of several things he was never meant to see Archy doing. Bad, bad things.

Johnny opens his eyes with a flutter of his lashes and climbs onto Archy's lap.

"I thought you'd gotten over this when you was sixteen"

That's quite embarrassing, right there. He doesn't like not having had something he'd wanted that long. He likes having what he wants, when he wants it.

"I'm quite sad to note," Johnny slides off Archy's lap to his feet, brushing as much of himself against Archy as possible as he goes, "that Lenny apparently had you neutered."

Archy stands up and Johnny takes a step backwards, which would very much be the wrong thing to do in this situation if he were angling to win a fight, here. Archy slaps him hard and Johnny lets it take him directly to the floor.

Johnny tastes blood. Sucks coppery saliva through his teeth, loud and obscene.

He stays where he's been put, but he wants Archy to know that isn't all there is to putting him down. Looking up at Archy from the floor, he can see how obvious it is Archy's hard as he is.

"I like you from this angle, Arch."

Archy keeps quiet, but smiles, a brief solar flare, a flash of his crooked front tooth, before it dies back to something cool and gut-twistingly, cock-jerkingly scary.

"Oh, Uncle, you've made me the happiest boy in the world," Johnny leans back on his elbows and doesn't hold back the shit-eating grin.

Archy takes a quick step around him on the floor and Johnny thinks, for one second, Archy's going to walk out the door, but quick as he has the thought Archy turns on his heel and boots Johnny in the ribs. Johnny makes a sound like a kicked dog.

"You know how long I've had that watch, John?"

"Of cour--" the rest of the words hiss out of his lungs in a sputtering cough, like his first hit of a bong, as Archy boots him in the ribs again, harder, hard as Johnny's ever been kicked, and Johnny has had kickings before.

Johnny curls in on himself and can't do anything but flip over as Archy shoves him with a toe under his burning ribs. That'll bruise. He's going to feel the colours coming up the whole time Archy fucks him.

"Of course you fucking know, Johnny. It was a rhetorical question. You rile me up, boy, you always have. You know what --" He leans down and presses Johnny's face hard into the thin, expensive rug. Johnny feels spit slide out the side of his mouth and pushes his hips into the unforgiving hardness of the floor, tries to talk, but is cut off by Archy's snapping: "No, shut up. You'll get what you asked for, now."

The sounds of a belt clasp opening, the slip-slide of leather against expensive cotton in silence, fills Johnny's ears and he lies on the floor and presses his open mouth to the rug and groans out _yes, please_.


End file.
